That shows that the new gamer cards from Nvidia is being artificially slowed down in terms of compute performance (I guess to sell more of their expencive Quadro cards)

Since I like to game as well and I don't want to pay premium price for a Quadro card, the Radeon HD 7970 started to look very sexy to me...and with the new OpenCL support, this was perfect!

But then I realized that I haven't actually seen anywhere that OpenCL support was for anything other then MAC, and maybe Adobe have some shady deal with Nvidia that prevents them from offering support on PC.

If the basis for your decision is the test at Tom's, you are in for a big disappointment. That test, like nearly everything at Tom's, is aimed almost exclusively at gamers and bears no relationship at all with the performance using PR.

Even an i7-3960X, overclocked to 4.1 GHz, 32 GB memory and an AMD 7900 video card, is more than 5 times slower than a fast system, because of the lacking CUDA acceleration. See http://ppbm5.com/DB-PPBM5-2.php

In this test the Radeon 7970 absolutely annihilates the GTX 680. This is why I asked about OpenCL support for PC.

That is why it is a lousy test and nothing more than crap (OpenGL is completely irrelevant for PR), since all AMD cards, even the 7970 are blown away by a simple GTX CUDA card for a quarter of the AMD price when used with Premiere Pro. Since you ask the question in preparing for CS6, gaming results are utterly irrelevant and the only thing that matters is performance with CS5.5/6 and the answer is clear: ONLY nVidia CUDA cards with 1+ GB VRAM. Even lowly nVidia cards are more than 10 times faster than any AMD card when rendering, scaling, blurring, FPS adjustments, etc.

There's really absolutely no reason to get bent out of shape at all over this. If you get the GTX 470 card (if you can find one), you'll be getting a card that is not only very affordable but provides every bit of power you probably need for Premiere Pro. As a gaming card, it's absolutely not terrible at all, either.

If you want a card that balances gaming and video editing capabillities (with Premiere Pro) you're going to be sacrificing something on one side or another. Yes, the chart from Tom's that you referenced does appear to show the even newer cards getting blown out of the water on compute performance but that DOES NOT take into consideration the way that Premiere Pro CS5 and later are leveraging the GPU.

And it's not an Adobe/Nvidia unholy alliance as you suggest, simply that Nvidia was at the table with Adobe years ago and they work closely together because Nvidia is invested in the workstation graphics/computing marketplace, and AMD sells gamer cards. And while Nvidia would certainly prefer that you purchase a Quadro high-end card, as far as Premiere Pro SPECIFICALLY is concerned, one of the better GTX cards will do you much better for both price and performance.

This is not an ATI/AMD versus Nvidia thing, and Adobe isn't trying to keep AMD out of the party, it has more to do with the types of GPU and the type of marketplace that each GPU manufacturer is chasing. Adobe and Nvidia working together makes sense because of what the two stand to gain mutually from their chosen market, and AMD/ATI would rather chase the much larger user base of gamers. Still, not saying that their GPUs cannot process the workload that Nvidia cards handle, just that they currently DON'T work the same way.

If you want brand loyalty and/or gaming peak performance, it sounds like you want an AMD/ATI card. If you want the best performance you can get in terms of Premiere Pro editing (and After Effects, and Photoshop) then you should take the clear advice of Harm, myself and many others, and just get a good Nvidia GTX card.

Final note....there is a reason that Tom's uses a dozen different tests when comparing computer hardware....it's because different applications process things different ways and different hardware reacts differently across the board. They cannot possibly prove out a real-world scenario for every user. Tom's did use to use Premiere Pro for baseline encoding testing, but that all is pre-2010 when CS5 launched and Premiere Pro begain heavily leveraging the GPU with Mercury Playback Engine. Tom's isn't really incentivized to run a bunch of peculiar tests for a single software package that has a relatively small user base compared to the millions of general computing, business computing and gamer setups. So take that into consideration when using Tom's guides to procure hardware for Premiere Pro CS5 and later.

Why a 480? I just got GTX 580 Ti for about $200 at newegg.com. I upgraded from a GTX 280.

Jeff

400 and 500 is the same generation of GPU's.

600 is a new generation...

Christian Jolly wrote:

There's really absolutely no reason to get bent out of shape at all over this.

If you want a card that balances gaming and video editing capabillities (with Premiere Pro) you're going to be sacrificing something on one side or another.

See..there's the thing I'm getting bent out of shape about. Last generation of Nvidia GPU's I didn't have to sacrifice anything. The same piece of silicon that went into high-end Quadro cards, went into the GTX 480.

I can understand that Nvidia wants to make more money on this, so it makes sense that they limit the GTX 680 this time around...it just sucks for us consumers. And that's where AMD comes in...they don't limit anything.

Except...I can't use all that power.

And I shouldn't be forced to buying tech that is 2 or even 3 generations old...have you tried playing Battlefield 3 in 2560 x 1440 on a GTX 470? It aint pretty

And I shouldn't be forced to buying tech that is 2 or even 3 generations old...have you tried playing Battlefield 3 in 2560 x 1440 on a GTX 470? It aint pretty

Normally editors don't play games on their editing machine. They have a separate gaming machine if they so desire, but never will they corrupt their editing workstation with games or other silly stuff. If you want to be the exception, go ahead and suffer the consequences.

And I shouldn't be forced to buying tech that is 2 or even 3 generations old...have you tried playing Battlefield 3 in 2560 x 1440 on a GTX 470? It aint pretty

Normally editors don't play games on their editing machine. They have a separate gaming machine if they so desire, but never will they corrupt their editing workstation with games or other silly stuff. If you want to be the exception, go ahead and suffer the consequences.

Well..let's just refer to me as a high-end user rather then a pro editor...that being said, I never ever had any problems using my computer for multiple purposes.

have you tried playing Battlefield 3 in 2560 x 1440 on a GTX 470? It aint pretty

No, the last PC-based video game I got into was Half Life

Not that I don't enjoy gaming, just that I don't have time anymore. Running my own company, taking care of my 4 year old son and all that stuff....well, it adds up I guess. Gaming is so down the priority list it might as well not even be there.

I will say this, however...if you DO want to have a multipurpose gaming/editing station, I would HIGHLY recommend having two separate hard drives with separate OS installations (either internal drives, or use removable eSATA connections and physically swap out the drives). Make one of them your super-clean, only-video-editing work installations, and make the other one your free-for-all, gaming/web-surfing/"other" stuff machine. When you want to edit, reboot into your editing OS installation. When you're ready to do everything else, boot into your catch-all OS. Make sure that your media drives and scratch disks are not accessed (read only) on the catch-all OS.

This of course, does NOT solve the GPU choice problem you have here. HOWEVER, you may consider installing an AMD and Nvidia GPU and just disable one or the other depending upon which OS you are in at the time. I'm not guaranteeing any success with this, just my best suggestion for you.

you may consider installing an AMD and Nvidia GPU and just disable one or the other depending upon which OS you are in at the time.

Yea I thought about that (not the easiest or cheapest solution though )

The problem is, that for any GPU operation that does not require CUDA (this includes SpeedGrade, everything in After Effects except ray-trace and Photoshop) the Radeon 7970 is many many times faster then anything affordable from Nvidia.

That's because the applications that you describe all use OpenGL (an older, pre-CUDA/pre-OpenCL API standard) more heavily than Premiere Pro does. In addition, AMD Radeon cards are generally faster than otherwise comparable NVidia GeForce cards in OpenGL due to the NVidia gaming cards' lack of robust OpenGL support at driver level.